Indian Victims Relate Horror of Kidney Theft

As Mohammad Salim Khan gained consciousness, he found himself in an unfamiliar house with a stranger in front of him wearing a surgical mask and gloves.

"What's happened to me?" Khan (through an interpreter) said he asked the man, because he could not move his limbs.

"Your kidney has been removed," the man said.

"How will I live?" Khan asked, shocked at the information.

Khan, 33, said that he was taken to the three-story house where the illegal surgery took place by men who offered him construction work. Khan explained all of this while lying in a bed in the isolation ward of the Gurgaon Civil Hospital, located on the outskirts of Delhi.

His extreme story is similar to those of the two men in the beds on either side of him -- Shakil Ahmed, 28, and Naseem Mohammad, 25 -- the same men who were in the room with him when he woke up from his surgery.

Victims of organ theft recovering at Gurgaon Civil Hospital

For laborers like Khan, days often begin at a central gathering spot where men approach them with manual labor opportunities. And it was at one of these spots where all three victims were offered work for 150 rupees (about $4) a day. Then all three men -- on varying dates over the past two weeks -- were taken to a house and kept there at gunpoint for several days.

Surgical masks strewn about a lot near the house

Bizarre as the story sounds, the three men all said that at first they were not suspicious of what was happening.

For Mohammad, much of the experience -- aside from being held at gunpoint -- rang true to what he had been offered initially: free food and housing. And the lack of work for a few days seemed all right with him because he was told he would still be paid.

Mohammad Salim Khan, 33

Eventually, the three men said, they were each brought individually to the house with a hidden state-of-the-art operating room. Tests, likely to determine their blood type, were also administered.

The men said they were given shots that made them pass out and they woke up to excruciating pain and scars that wrapped around their thin waists.

After Khan awoke and was assured by the masked man that he was medically fine, he was told he would be killed if he ever spoke about the surgery.

"If you tell anyone that your kidney has been removed at this very place or if you tell anyone that your kidney has been removed at all, there is a man who is following you who will shoot you," Khan said he was told.

Shakil Ahmed, 28

When asked if he believed that a man was going to follow his every move for the rest of his life, Khan said, "If someone can forcibly take my kidney out of me, they could also kill me."

A few hours after Khan's conversation with the stranger, police raided the house-turned-operating-theater to find the three victims, along with two other men who were next in line for kidney removals. Khan said that before the police raid two servants helped him dress, warned him of the impending arrival and then fled the scene. Police also busted another nearby house where an American couple was staying.

The victims were brought to the hospital, where they underwent medical testing.

"The MRIs all say that the surgery has been done, the kidney has been removed and the way the surgery has been conducted and the precision of the surgery all point to the professionalism of the operating surgeon," said Dr. S.P. Bhanot, 33, a surgeon at Gurgaon Civil.